Space Pioneers Page 4

  "All the way from Archimedes, and we didn't even get a look at the floor," he whispered.

  For a moment, following the raw scar of the slide with his eye, he considered climbing all the way down and venturing out onto the crater floor to examine the ground. For centuries, the floor of Plato had been reported by Earth observers to darken with the rising sun until at noon it was nearly black. Occasionally, there were stories of misty clouds obscuring the surface, and of shifts in the pattern of light streaks and spots.

  One of the expedition's first assignments, therefore, had been the investigation of Plato, to check the unlikely possibility that there might be some primitive, airless form of life present. But the present sortie was clearly ended.

  "Not one damn chance," Hansen told himself as he squinted downward. "None of them had a suit on when I got out."

  On a terrace about a third of the way down lay an object with an oddly regular shape. It gleamed in the blue-green earth-light, and Hansen peered more intently. It looked like one of the spare oxygen cylinders that had been carried on top of the tractor.

  Hansen abruptly became sensitive about the supply of his suit tank. Before he did anything, even sitting down to think the situation over, he wanted to get down there and find out if the cylinder was full.

  Despite his eagerness, he held back until he thought he had spied a reasonable path. It involved going two or three hundred feet out of his way, but Hansen managed to work his way down to the lower level without serious difficulty. Once or twice, he slithered a few feet when loose rock shaled off under his grip, but even with his suit and equipment, he weighed little over forty pounds. As long as he did not drop very far, he could always stop himself one-handed.

  He walked back along the level strip which was about fifty yards wide at this point, until he approached the path of the landslip. Near it, apparently having been scraped off as the tractor rolled, lay the cylinder.

  He checked it hurriedly.

  "Whew! Well, that's some help, anyway," he told himself, discovering that the tank had not been tapped.

  He left the cylinder and walked over to the inner limit of the level band. Scanning the steep slope and the debris of the slide, he thought he could pick out two or three scraps of twisted metal. There was nothing to be done.

  "I'd better get back up and think this out," he decided.

  He took the broken chain that had held the tank to the tractor and hooked a broken link through it to make a sling. For the time being, he contented himself with using it as a handle to drag the lucky supply of oxygen after him.

  After regaining his original position, the going was easier to the top of the ringwall. They had come over one of the several passes crossing the southern part of the cliffs, and Hansen walked through in a few minutes. The thickness of the ringwall here was only a mile or so, although at the base it probably approached ten miles.

  He came out onto a little plateau, and the dim plain of the Mare Imbrium spread out before him. Hansen suddenly felt tiny, lost, and insignificant.

  "What am I gonna do?" he asked himself.

  For the first time, he had admitted his predicament to himself. His gauntlet crept up to his chest where the switch of his radio protruded through the chafing suit.

  "Hello Base! Tractor Two to Base! Tractor Two to Base! Over."

  He waited several minutes, and repeated the call five or six times. He screwed his eyes shut to throw every ounce of concentration into listening.

  No human voice broke into the quiet hissing of the earphones. Hansen sighed.

  "Never reach them, of course!" he grumbled. "This set is made to reach about your arm's length."

  He remembered that Van Ness had complained about the reception the last time they had called in, and asked Hansen to maneuver to the top of a ridge of vein mountains near the hulking silhouette of Pico. Hansen was higher now, but also much farther from home.

  "Mike Ramirez and Joey Friedman aren't the kind to miss a call," he muttered. "It seems to me, Paul E. Hansen, my boy . . . that you are ... on your own!"

  The radio had been but a faint hope, inspired by his height and tales of freak reception. He was not too disappointed. Looking down the rough outer slope of the ringwall, he saw that it was not by any means as steep as the inner, and that fact settled it.

  "Guess I'd better see how far I can get," Hansen decided. "When they don't get the regular report over the tractor radio, they'll probably send out another crew to follow the trail. If I can meet them out a way, maybe even as far as Pico, it'll save that much time."

  After considerable fumbling, he balanced the large cylinder on his back atop the other equipment with the chain sling across his chest. He started along the series of gentle slopes the tractor had climbed earlier. Deliberately, he pushed to the back of his mind the possibility he would have to face sometime: Base might decide the crew had been too eager to negotiate the ringwall to call back before being blanked out by the mass of rock.

  He had to restrain a temptation to rush headlong down to the plain across miles of rough grades. Even with his tremendous load of equipment, he might still travel in twenty-foot bounds in Lunar gravity; but he had no desire to plunge all the way to the bottom with one misstep.

  "It'll be easy enough going down," he murmured. "And after that, I can judge the direction well enough from Earth."

  He looked up at the brightness of the planet. Earth was rather high in the Lunar sky, although not overhead because of his position far north. It would indicate roughly his southerly course towards Archimedes. As he looked, he noticed that much of the eastern coast of North America, which to his view was almost centered on the hemisphere, was blanketed in clouds.

  "Wish I was there right now," he sighed. "Rain and all!"

  He wondered about the next step as he worked his way around ridges radiating from the sizable minor craterlet in Plato's ringwall. He still had a good view of the gray plain at the foot of the heights. Although reasonably flat—probably leveled by the colossal flow of lava that had formed the Mare Imbrium, filling older craters and melting down or inundating existing mountains until merely their crests showed—it contained many hills and irregularities that would be even more apparent to a man on foot than from the tractor.

  He worked past the craterlet, leaving it to his right. Whenever he struck a reasonably level stretch, he moved at a bounding trot. The first time he tried this, he tumbled head over heels and gave himself a fright lest he rupture the spacesuit on a projecting rock. Thereafter, he was more careful until he got used to being so top-heavy because of the huge oxygen tank.

  Finally, scrambling down the last ridges of old debris, he found himself on the level floor of the "Sea of Showers," in the region between Plato and the jutting, lonely Mt. Pico. Off to his right, an extension of the ringwall behind him thrust out to point at the group of other peaks known as the Teneriffe Mountains, which were somewhat like a flock of lesser Picos. The ground on which he stood had perhaps once been part of another crater, twin in size to Plato; but now only detectable by faint outlines and vein mountains. In the past, some astronomers had called it Newton, before deciding upon a more worthy landmark for Sir Isaac.

  It had taken Hansen nearly half an hour, and he paused now to catch his breath.

  "I feel pretty good," he exclaimed with relief. "I'm carrying quite a lot to go at that speed, but I don't seem to get tired." He thought a moment, and warned himself, "You'd better not, either!"

  He turned partly to look at the ringwall towering behind him. It loomed grimly, scored with deep shadows of cracks into which the rays of Earth, seventy times brighter than moonlight it received from Luna, could not penetrate.

  Hansen turned away hastily. The mountainous mass made him uneasy; he remembered how easily a landslip had started on the inner slope.

  "I'd better get moving!"

  He struck out at a brisk, bounding pace, a trot on Luna without the effort of a normal trot. The ground was fairly level, and he congratul
ated himself upon making good time. Once or twice, he staggered a little, having overbalanced; but he soon got into the rhythm of the pace and the load on his back ceased to bother him. He bore slightly to the right, toward the jutting point of the ring-wall.

  The footing was like powdery gray sand. Alternating extremes of temperature during the two-week Lunar day or night had cracked the rock surface until successive expansions and contractions had affected the crystalline structure of the top layers. When these had flaked off, the powder had formed an insulating layer, but the result as far as Hansen was concerned was that he trotted on a sandy footing. When he looked back, he could see the particles kicked up by his last few steps still above the surface. They fell rather neatly, there being no air to whirl them about.

  Gradually, he realized that the unobstructive noises of his space-suit had risen a notch in tone. The clever little machines were laboring to dispel the effects of his faster breathing. He dropped down to an easy walk, which was still a goodly pace in the light gravity.

  "Guess I'm sweating more, too," he told himself. "Now that I think of it, my mouth's a little dry."

  He twisted his neck until he could get his hps on the thin rubber hose sticking up to the left of his chin. He closed his teeth on the clamp, and sucked up a few swallows of water from his tank. It was not particularly tasty, but at least it was cool. It would have been a lot colder if carried uninsulated, he reflected. The night temperature of Luna was something like minus one-fifty Centigrade, and it dropped like a shot as soon as the surface was shaded from the sun.

  Refreshed, he started out again at a bounding run, rejoicing in his strength. He felt as if he were just jogging along, but the ground rolled back under his feet swiftly. Had he been on such a bleak desert on Earth, he knew he would be slogging ankle-deep in sand— if he could move at all. His own weight was between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and sixty pounds. With what he was wearing and carrying, he was probably close to three hundred. It did not bother him here.

  "It isn't bad at all," he thought with satisfaction. "Feels like jogging around the track in school, warming up for a race. One ... two ... three ... four—still got pretty good form! Not even breathing hard!"

  It occurred to him that it resembled a footrace in one other particular. He was deliberately putting off consideration of the finish while he still felt good.

  "Oh, 111 meet them somewhere along the way," he said aloud, despite a momentary doubt that he was talking too much to himself. "Pretty soon, I'll cross the tractor trail. I'll follow it out maybe as far as Pico and wait for them to pick me up. The relief crew can't miss a landmark like that. It's damn' near nine thousand feet high, straight up out of the flat plain."

  He slowed down somewhat to scrutinize a ridge ahead. It turned out to be an easy grade and he skimmed over it easily. Otherwise, however, he was beginning to lose his recent feeling of satisfaction. Now that he moved out into the flat, empty plain, the essential grimness of Lunar landscape was more apparent than when disguised by the majesty of the view from atop the ringwall. It was a study in gray and black, the powdery sand and the deep shadows groping toward him as he trotted into the earthshine. Above was the deep black of an airless sky, lit by the bright Earih and chilly stars.

  Gray, black, green, white—and all of it cold and inhospitable.

  "I feel like I'm not wanted here," Hansen thought. "Well, that makes it mutual, I guess!"

  He looked back, and was amazed at the distance he had covered. Already, Plato looked more like a range of towering mountains than it did like a barrier of cliffs.

  "This won't take so long," he reassured himself. "I must have covered five miles, running like this. Maybe almost ten."

  He circled a tiny craterlet, or "bead," a few hundred yards across. In the precise center, it had a tiny peak, corresponding to the central mountain masses found in nearly half the craters of Luna. For the first time, Hansen regretted the camera that had gone down with the tractor.

  "Too busy driving to take any pix on the way," he growled, "and now that I come across a perfect miniature, I have no camera. A fine spare photographer for an expedition this size!"

  He diverted himself for a few minutes by considering what a fool he was to come to Luna in the first place. He had not really wanted to, and he was sure there were plenty of others who would have been better qualified and better pleased at the opportunity. Still, it was strange sometimes how a man would do things he did not want to because someone else was doing them.

  He glanced up at Earth, and kept moving southward with the shining globe on his left front.

  Mike and Joey sat before their radio, on folding chairs and empty crate respectively, maintaining whenever not directly addressed an almost sullen silence. Their tiny cubicle was becoming entirely too crowded to suit them.

  Dr. Burney paced up and down before the wall map of the Mare Imbrium. Opposite him, the lower section of the radiomen's double bunk—canvas and aluminum like their single chair—had collected an overload of three. Dr. Sherman, the chief astronomer, sat between Bucky O'Neil and Emil Wohl. Besides heading the geologists, Wohl was Burney's second in command; and O'Neil was present in case it was decided to send out a rocket to photograph the Plato region.

  "Ya'd think they could use their own rooms," Joey whispered into Mike's ear. "All but Bucky got singles. How we gonna catch an incoming call with all this racket?"

  The "racket" at the moment consisted mostly of sighs, finger-drumming, and a tortured semiwhistle from where Sherman sat staring at the map with his chin cupped in one hand.

  "There's little doubt of the general location," repeated Bumey, once more reaching a familiar impasse. "But I hate to hold up the other work to send out a crew when we cannot with any certainty agree that something has gone wrong."

  "Let's see," said Wohl, "there was some difficulty, was there not, the last time they communicated?"

  When no one answered, Mike finally repeated his previous testimony.

  "Van Ness said they drove up a sort of mountain to get us. Complained a litde about reception. He might've been getting to the limit."

  "Then," said Wohl, "there is really no reason for alarm, is there? They could just as well have decided that continuing the mission was more important than running around looking for a good radio position, couldn't they?"

  Mike considered that glumly.

  "It's funny they didn't back up far enough to make one call to let me know they were going out of reach," he grumbled. "The speed they make in that rig, it wouldn'ta taken them long."

  "That would have been the proper action," admitted Bumey, "but we must not demand perfect adherence to the rules when a group is in the field and may have perfectly good reasons for disregarding them. No, I think we had best—Who's that coming?"

  Bucky O'Neil bounded up from the end of the bunk and stuck bis head out the door. When he looked around, his freckled face was unhappy.

  "Johnny Pierce from the map section," he announced. "He's got Louise with him. I guess you don't need me any more."

  He edged out the door as two others of the Base staff came in. The one who acted as if he had business there was a lean, bespectacled man who managed to achieve a vaguely scholarly air despite rough clothing.

  Trailing him was a girl who looked as if the heating economy that necessitated the standard costume of the Base also had the effect of cheating the male personnel of a brightening influence. The shapeless clothing, however, did not lesson the attractiveness of her lightly tanned features or lively black eyes. She wore her dark hair tucked into a knit cap that on Earth probably would have been donned only as a joke.

  "We've looked at the photo maps," Pierce reported in a dry, husky voice. "They might very well be out of range. Lots of curvature in that distance, even with the depression caused by a mass of lava like that Mare Imbrium."

  Burney accepted this with an expression of relief.

  "I heard them talking about the Plato crew," the girl put in. "What's
going on?"

  Her voice was warm and, like a singer's, stronger than her petite outline would have suggested.

  "Oh . . . just checking the radio reception," said Burney. "You can get the details from Mike, I suppose, if you have time off from the observatory. The rest of us are through here."

  Mike scowled, and the girl looked puzzled; but Burney, Wohl, and Sherman crowded through the door as if intent upon some new project. Sherman muttered something about the problem of erecting a transparent dome for direct observations, and the voices receded down the corridor. Pierce slipped out after them.

  "Did I say something?" inquired Louise. "I only thought there might be news."

  "I guess they're just busy, Louise," Mike said. He turned to the radio, unplugged the speaker, and donned a set of earphones. "You know how it is. Why don't you catch Bucky? He's got nothing to do for a while."

  Louise had started to show her even white teeth in a smile which now faded. Joey picked up his empty crate and busily moved it around to the other side of the radio set-up.

  "Sorry," said the girl, her dark eyes beginning to smolder. "I'll ask somebody else."

  They listened to her footsteps as they faded away in the corridor. Mike looked at Joey and shrugged.

  "What was I gonna tell her?" he asked. "That her husband either forgot to call in—or got himself quick-frozen when something in his tractor popped?"

  Joey shook his head sympathetically. "Tough on her."

  "Dunno why she had to come to Luna in the first place," Mike complained. "I can see a nurse like Jean doin' it, and a typewriter pusher like old Edna oughta be classed expendable. But a babe like Louisel"

  "It's her science," said Joey. "She wants to see the stars better."

  "We got enough astronomers now. She's a smart girl, all right— can't take that away from her. But if she was my woman, she wouldn'ta come up herel"

  "If she was mine," countered Joey, "I wouldn'ta taken a second-rate job just to follow her up here eitherl But you're dreaming about the past, Boss."